ETEC 565 and the Journey to the Sun

When I began this course, I came to it with some experience, since I use Moodle in my teaching practice and also develop and design websites for companies.    In some ways I felt as if I had already constructed my wings, like Icarus, and was ready to journey to the Sun, yet what I discovered along the way were insights that were unexpected.

 

Flight Path

My passion for the Digital Media arts has driven my teaching practice and learning throughout the last 20 years, but have culminated in a new Digital Media Arts program I constructed at my school based on research and techniques learned in MET.  I thrive on change and feel at home in the digital space of flows of the Internet.  What I seek in my teaching and learning is a creative space in which the inner artist can thrive, share learning through a community of practice, build educational artifacts in project and social-based learning opportunities, and organize self-directed and blended learning models through crowdsourced resources and social media interactions.  This is built into my teaching practice where the main goal is not the transmission of skills in the digital media arts, but rather critical literacy and media creation, which Buckingham (2007) describes as the development of skills for self-expression which enabling a more reflective use and understanding of media.  This hearkens to social and constructivist theories of Vygotsky (Tu, Blocher & Roberts 2008) and Bruner (Lewis, Pea & Rosen 2010) which describe the transformation of learning through the building of tools or artifacts to provide a material basis for consciousness.  This is the basis of my digital media arts program and professional experience in graphic design, website design and marketing.

My goals for the course were broad and attainable, yet the end result of my work provided different results and goal development along the journey.  At first, I wanted to create interactive learning solutions, further develop social media and blog strategies,  produce media presentations and begin to develop a crowdsourced-based framework for just-in-time learning.  I also wanted to discover a more effective method of creating an interactive community of practice, and discover how I could implement new theories to integrate cyber-physical learning opportunities into my teaching and corporate adventures.  In seeking each learner’s inner artist, the path with each person must take differs tremendously and is unique to each experience.  My original goals for the course were to develop new insights into developing excellent digital and cyber learning opportunities for my digital media arts class, and the insights I have gained have provided me much more than I anticipated.

 

eLearning Toolkit experience

I found the eLearning toolkit to be well-structured, and easily accessible to scaffold the principles needed to develop strong educational artefacts for the course.  Beginning with accessibility is ingenious, since we need to design learning tools that may be accessed on all devices and by all learning styles and in particular, for those with exceptional learning needs.  Having worked in the webdesign industry for a couple of decades, I have continually needed to work with aspects of accessibility, so I was happy to see the W3C links and the emphasis on ensuring universality of content.  Each element within the toolkit is well-constructed and provides an excellent foundation for those with less experience in this area.  I work with Moodle at my school and have set up a large variety of classes, I also develop websites, so the LMS sections and HTML sections were good to skim to refresh my memory of some of the basic concepts.  While I did not spend a great deal of time within the toolkit, since I was very familiar with the content, I admired the layout of the topics, the elements designed to scaffold a constructivist learning experience and the overall accessibility for those who are learning or reviewing the content.

 

 

ETEC 565 Experiences and Reflections

I began the course with varied goals, high expectations and was looking for the opportunity to develop my course design skills to a new level and to find the academic backing for my design decisions.  The strongest and most influential experience in the course was the development of an LMS course about Social Media branding  in Moodle.  I worked extremely hard developing  a GUI concept for the entire course, including the splash page and each unit.  I developed the content, graphic design layout and the theoretical order of knowledge, combined with assignments and more.  This was the chance I had been waiting for, and I tried to incorporate much of what I have learned in the MET program, as well as my own teaching practice and design experience.  I was thrilled with the result and by the incredible amount I had learned.

Creating brand new content that needed to be heavily researched did take some time, since I have only taught elements in very brief terms before.  I used a symbol system of icons to attract the attention of the digital netizen, but removed the ability to click it, so that it would direct the eyes of the reader  to the paragraph to look for a read more button.  Instead of a plain link to the content, as I have done in Moodle in the past, I developed a rich interface with an inviting paragraph.  In this manner I combined the concept of a blog with standard viewer click behaviour and found an inviting way to take a learner through a course.  I beta tested the course on a few of my students in the summer Digital Media Arts class and they all responded extremely well and navigated through the course exactly as I had planned for.  The concept of creating a social media course was a new idea and one of the unexpected gems I discovered along the learning journey.  While I had planned to integrate new interactive learning modules, this type of environment did not fit the overall theme of clean layout, easy navigation and overall ease of use.  A wonderful aspect is that, like a website, the course is a fluid entity of knowledge that can be adapted, experimented with and expanded in the future.  To read more about the theory and ideas behind the project, please see the course site page.

This course modeled excellent scaffolding methods.  For example, it began with a study theoretical frameworks and platforms, built in practical skill-building and real-world projects, such as developing detailed rubrics for choosing technology, based on Bates and Poole (2003) SECTIONS model and writing up a proposal for a Moodle server.  This was a important exercise which integrated our technology selection abilities and ability to write up well-researched proposals.  Creating an assessment that tested the variety of assessment models within Moodle  as also an essential component.  Assessment is always a difficult task, and the digital realm of an LMS system can make it even more daunting.  The digital story was a good experience, but the fact that only web 2.0 editing tools were limiting, particularly for those of us who have done ETEC 531 and have made media presentations.

The course itself was well-modeled to demonstrate constructivist strategies and to show how an online course should be organized.Yet, above all this experiential educational artefact creation was the incredible interaction between our community of inquiry and practice.  Dr. John Egan was very instrumental in modeling online teaching methods , inspiring conversation and utilizing the principles regarding guiding feedback and encouraging strong communication and group learning, as described in Anderson (2008).

One of my original course goals was to learn how to make a vibrant community of practice for my Digital Media Arts classes.  This course showed me the importance of good course design – both visually and structurally, and we even set up a Google+ circle for those who wanted to continue their learning together.  It is important that we, as educators and educational technology designers develop methods to bring the social and community into online learning environments, so that we can model it for our students.  Using the Bates and Poole’s SECTIONS model (2003), Google+ has many options for online community of practice settings that go beyond any social network created so far.  One needs to experiment with it to see its potential, which we will do after the class is completed.

 

Getting Closer to the Sun

 

The next steps in my learning journey will be to incorporate all the experimentation I have done with Moodle into my existing courses in my teaching practice.  I will also use the SECTIONS model, follow Anderson’s (2008) advice and choose web 2.0 tools carefully before integrating them into my teachingpractice and also deliver high-quality feedback for my students in their online courses.  In my corporate projects, I will utilize all I have learned here to develop online training programs for companies I do design and marketing projects with, as well as eventually build an online set of courses for the Luxembourg Academy, so that there is more to the school than just travel education opportunities.

I now have  more sophisticated view on how to construct a creative, interactive online learning environment that is designed for learning, rather than just for learners.  There are only two more courses for me to complete to finish the MET program and already some incredible job opportunities are becoming available that would never have been applicable before I started this learning journey.

This is only the beginning of my learning  journey.  Since I teach the Digital Media Arts and have a website design company, my need to learn continuously will never stop.  I will continue to exist in the digital space of flows, developing my digital identity, learning as much as I can, and developing a global collaboration circle to provide a community in which to learn.  With each new class, and each new corporate project I need to learn a great deal about educational technology, social media, and design for the community of cyberspace.  This drives my learning to new heights so that I am like a leaf floating on a digital stream of information employing just-in-time learning strategies and having the courage to produce knowledge in our network society.

 

 

 

References:

Anderson, T. (2008). Towards a Theory of Online Learning. In: T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.), Theory and Practice of Online Learning. Edmonton AB: Athabasca University. Accessed online 3 March 2009 http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/02_Anderson_2008_Anderson-Online_Learning.pdf

Bates, A.W. & Poole, G. (2003). Chapter 4: a Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education: Foundations for Success. (pp. 77-105). San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers.

Buckingham, David(2007). Media education goes digital: an introduction.Learning, Media and Technology, 32: 2, 111 — 119.  DOI: 10.1080/17439880701343006

Graphics used in blog (2011, August 2, 2o11). License obtained from 123RF.com

Lewis, Sarah, Pea, Roy and Rosen, Joseph (2010). Media in generative learning communities beyond participation to co-creation of meaning: mobile social. Social Science Information, 45:351. DOI: 10.1177/0539018410370726

Tu , Chih-Hsiung, Blocher, Michael and Roberts, Gayle (2008). Constructs for Web 2.0 learning environments: a theatrical metaphor. Educational Media International, 45( 4), 253–269.